


Graciousness and Repose

by disenchanted



Category: Maurice - E. M. Forster
Genre: First Love, Future Fic, M/M, Retrospective, Reunions, Self-Discovery, Yuletide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 08:51:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2806664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/disenchanted/pseuds/disenchanted
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In 1924, as he ventures into the woods in search of Maurice, Clive remembers earlier attempts to find companionship and rest.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Graciousness and Repose

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Fantasio](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fantasio/gifts).



> _He liked the night also. It had graciousness and repose. It was not absolutely dark. Just as he was about to lose his way up from the station, he saw another street lamp, and then past that another. There were chains in every direction, one of which he followed to his goal._ —E.M. Forster, _Maurice_.
> 
> Happy Yuletide, Fantasio! This fic was an absolute joy to write; your prompts gave me more ideas than I knew what to do with. I hope that I did justice to some of those prompts—and I hope that you enjoy.
> 
> Thanks to Lilliburlero for betaing.

_i. Now_

When Clive heard it then, it seemed as if it were the first time since that evening in Fetherstonhaugh's rooms. He had been dozing, reclining in the armchair nearest the fire, while across the smoking room his host demonstrated to one of the other guests the breadth of his collection of gramophone records. The initial selections, despite their liveliness, had not roused Clive. His efforts at keeping awake had ended in a transference of alertness from one realm to the other, so that though he thought clearly, he was stirred by nothing from without. In that private darkness, the second movement of Tchaikovsky's Symphony 'Pathétique' twirled towards him, extending its soft arms in a plaintive gesture, at last enfolding him. What he had known before, he knew again: he remembered playing this movement on the pianola, with Maurice—Hall, then—sitting at his side. The music would have been muffled there, but Hall preferred to be close.

The intervening years collapsed into an ellipsis; Clive saw that moment and the present together. Here a man, there a boy, both with a precision of gesture that did nothing to demonstrate the muffled floundering of the heart (he had told Hall, 'It's nearer waltzes,' and later, 'Dinner-jacket's enough, as you know'). In the cleft between heart and gesture lived the yearning, made up of the fall of a thousand sense-memories: whisky and soda, the scratch of the hearth rug, the pull of broad fingers through his hair. He saw, too, the purple dusk shrouding the mountains and sea; he smelt the evening primrose.

'Wasn't this,' one of the guests was saying, 'a sort of suicide note from the composer?'

'The fourth movement is grim enough,' replied another, laughing uneasily, as the second movement came to a close.

'That will be the next,' said the host, turning over the record and setting down the needle. The baleful groans of the fourth movement began to issue from the horn. 'Only the second and the fourth were recorded. No doubt Mr Durham will object.'

'Oh?' Clive opened his eyes. 'Yes, it's a good thing you’ve caught me drowsing. I might have asked you to fill in for the first and third.'

But the second, as if divining his desire for order and choosing to reject it, spun itself out interminably. He heard it as he bade his host good evening, as he went up, as he undressed. It lent him a certain elegance; he moved nimbly towards another state of being. His accompaniment was the lightness in his head, and the heaviness in his chest, which he felt with the physical immediacy of youth. He could not keep his breath from quickening; he could not keep his hands from trembling, though he smoked a cigarette.

Anne was asleep, having come up an hour before. Effectively alone, Clive unlatched the window and stood before it, feeling that there was something which was begging him to go out. Clive was silent, but the second movement had called out in his own voice: _Go—! Oh, go!_ Though at last he lay down, he felt himself continuing, as if it had never been stilled, that movement he had begun years before.

 

* * *

 

Houses like Penge, with the journeys and the deaths of their inhabitants, accrued loss rather than suffered it. The houses had been born before those who were born in the houses, and would live on after they were left. The villa in the pines had been built: it was lived within. When Maurice left, there had not been a loss, but a change of ownership; someone else had taken charge of the sardine boxes and the colored glass lamps. That person, Clive discovered, was Mrs Hall, who in a quiet exertion of will demanded that he stay to tea.

'You've come all this way.'

'Just from the city. Ought I to have telephoned?'

'There was no need,' said Mrs Hall, 'you're welcome.' Her generousness was pointed and accusatory.

Kitty Hall, in tweeds, came in from outside. She had fixed her hair to imitate a bob. In the dim light of the hall she took some time to recognise Clive; she looked upon him with a careful interest, as though he might at least prove amusing, then placed him and hardened.

'Mr Durham,' she said, striding forth to meet him, 'we thought we wouldn't see you again for another year at least.'

Though Mrs Hall had seen the opportunity to implicate Clive, Kitty Hall saw Clive's intent. She knew that he had placed himself rather at their mercy. Both of them, however, knew that it was Clive's friendship which had led Maurice into the woods. They regarded him with pity and suspicion; he was enemy and victim in one.

'Then I've been remiss,' said Clive to Kitty, 'and shall make reparation.'

The presence of a friend of Kitty's, a Miss Tonks, restricted Clive to a conventionality of manner which he thought would safeguard him. He found instead that it exposed him: his conversation, pleasant and safe, was the string upon which his feeling played. His eagerness to call attention to Anne demonstrated his remoteness from her; his confidence regarding the general election was a reminder of the instability of his position. In the last year's election, he had lost his seat to the Liberal candidate; and there were not yet any children.

Looking round the drawing room, examining the over-stuffed armchairs and the display cabinets, Clive remembered that he had been here on the day the love between himself and Maurice had ended. He viewed it now with a detached tolerance, as he would the home of any other acquaintance. It was not a place whose secrets he wished to be let in on; but because he and his love were one of its secrets, he felt there had been an irreconcilable mismatch. He searched the room for some detail—one of Maurice's books in the case, or a familiar scuff in the carpet—that might cause him to quicken, to regain the feeling of the past. But the past resided in Maurice; it was Maurice whom he sought.

Just as Clive was going out, he caught Kitty alone in the hall. He had only to turn towards her to gain her wary attention. She remained some steps away from him.

'You haven't ever had a letter from him?' asked Clive, though he remembered well enough how obdurate Maurice had been. Maurice moved forward with his shoulders straight and his head bent, as if he were walking into the wind.

'No, he doesn't write, and we don't wait for a letter.' Kitty seemed to marvel that Clive had not ceased to think of Maurice. At the same time, she withdrew; she guarded something within herself. 'You mean to ask, do I have his address? You weren't curious whether he wrote to _us_.'

'I thought I might pay him a visit as well.'

'It isn't,' said Kitty, 'the sort of place one pays visits to. He's gone away.'

Away—she spoke of it as if it were a place in itself. 'Away' contained the thousands of lives Maurice might now be leading; the million variations in thought and feeling, or in human connexion, that he might have come to know. To Clive, 'away' had long been a place of unknown terrors. If he ever thought of it, he felt grateful not to be there. Only when Kitty told him of the woods did he consider that those multitudes might have held joy also.

* * *

 

The journey up to Yorkshire held some of the humming potential of the journey up to college for Michaelmas term. There were pleasures to be shaken out of the folds of the quotidian. At Cambridge, those pleasures had been walks to lectures beneath falling leaves; ardent debate over drinks in rooms; perhaps a touch of the hand, or a brush of cheek against cheek. Such things were, in those exact configurations, now irretrievable. He had gone on. Yet pleasures that shared in their nature lay in Yorkshire, in the woods.

Clive knew the substance of these possibilities, their comfort and contentment, but did not know their form. Maurice had spoken of sharing: shared work, a shared bed? Clive's capacity for imagination seemed to reach its end at the place of Maurice's happiness. He put down his copy of the _Daily Telegraph_ and looked out of the window of the railway carriage, towards the farmhouses and the placid animals, the dense brown valleys, the sharp orange sun of an autumn afternoon.

As dusk fell, he saw his own reflection emerge in the window-glass. His features remained fine, though his chin had softened and his hairline receded, giving him something of the look of a small child. He wished that he had not grown old; or that he had grown old in another, kinder way.

 

* * *

 

_ii. Then_

If there was one image which embodied the spring of Clive's second year, it was the view from Risley's rooms one Sunday afternoon: the window half-open to the blooming shrubbery and the grass of the court below. On a table in front of the window, Risley had placed a vase of regal magnolias. Clive, lazing in an armchair that made him feel comically small, watched the shadow of the magnolias move over the fabric of his trouser leg.

'A poem should be like a lemon drop,' Risley was saying. He was arguing with a friend of his called Bigham, whom Clive knew only peripherally. 'Delectable, but of one flavour, lasting for no longer than ten minutes, and able to be enjoyed without undue mastication.'

'According to those parameters, _Kubla Khan_ fits the bill,' replied Bigham. He appeared to care less about poetry than about needling Risley, who met him with a similar playfulness.

Leaning back against the desk, Bigham twirled the signet ring on his finger, peering down at Risley with the intensity of someone who has noticed a smear of jam on the chin and cannot keep from staring. There was, however, no smear of jam—only Risley, supercilious and sly.

'By accident, yes,' said Risley. 'One wishes more poets would be distracted from finishing their poems.'

'It's a shame that opium isn't the done thing nowadays.'

'Wilde was the nail in the coffin of _that_ particular pleasure. Though if anyone else—for instance, David Lloyd George—had managed to popularise it, I would have wished it _had_ been left with Coleridge.'

Last term, dining with Risley's set, Clive had drunk too much brandy, wobbled into the corridor in search of the lavatory, and found Risley and Bigham on the half-landing. Bigham was clutching Risley's sleeve; Risley was making a feint retreat, drawing away to entice Bigham nearer. Clive stumbled conspicuously, and the two of them parted, laughing.

Risley, later that evening, had touched Clive's shoulder and said, 'I don't mind that you disapprove. It adds a sense of tension, like intersecting lines in a picture. There are so few of your kind left—by that I mean the Platonists, not the other: that would be “our kind”.'

The shadow of the magnolias now covered Clive's left hand, which lay limply on the seat cushion. Leaning against the mantelpiece, Risley allowed Bigham to light his cigarette. The gesture was lingering enough to make Clive flush. He wondered whether Risley was wrong, whether the three of them were not in fact of one kind. There was a frisson of anticipation between Risley and Bigham that Clive did not wish for his own friendships. He hoped that the presence of the beloved alone would be his nourishment. He hoped that yearning was the burden of the solitary, and would disappear upon the entrance of another.

* * *

 

Another did enter, and Clive yearned no less, though in the Lent term he and Hall were inseparable. Clive grew used to the tug of Hall's arm intertwined with his own; the thumping of Hall's footsteps in the corridor; the scattering of crumbs on his rug after Hall had made toast over the fire. He grew used to the rhythm of their interaction: Hall's dismissal of his flights of abstraction, Hall's unconscious bestowal of pleasure. Every now and then, they tumbled into the boyish, the chaotic; they bruised their knees and scraped their knuckles, wrinkled carpets and scuffed table-legs. When Hall was away, at a lecture or in his own rooms, Clive saw his presence in the etchings he had made in their environment, and in Clive's body.

Clive was most content when he was due to see Hall soon. He rubbed the bruises on his knees, balanced out the rickety chair Hall had taken as his favourite, and felt himself full of a desire that would soon be gratified—the desire, that is, for the company of his friend. When they were reunited and walked arm in arm, Clive acknowledged that he was not quite full up: he wanted some other sensation. He remembered Risley and Bigham as they had been on that Sunday in spring, sunlit, standing with their toes pointed towards each other.

The last snow came in late February, close to the end of term. Seeing no reason to go out, Clive had nestled into bed with a French novel Risley had lent him. He was startled by the thump of a fistful of snow against his window. Hall stood outside, with his cheeks ruddy and his overcoat unbuttoned. His open, joyous mouth put out plumes of fog. It was perhaps the fullest moment of their friendship: Hall was there and not-there, in sight and out of reach, able to be met. All that was left was the joining; but the space between them was positive, an entity in and of itself, replete with its own tenderness.

'Come down!' cried Hall.

Putting his hands on the snowy sill, Clive said, 'No—come up! Take off that coat and look out of the window. I am now.'

'Yes,' said Hall, 'because you haven't come down yet. You haven't felt it. It's tremendous.'

'I do feel it,' said Clive, laughing, rubbing his arms. 'I mean I feel the pneumonia coming on. In here there is chocolate.'

Despite having groused about the cold, Clive went out in a rush, without an overcoat, and was soon shivering. Hall tromped ahead, his hands stuffed in his pockets and his legs swinging wide, leaving long footprints in the snow. Hearing Clive's footsteps behind him, Hall turned back and flung out his arm, waiting for Clive to take it, that they might walk together. He had the assured, distracted pose of one who did not stop to question whether or not his arm would be taken. His gloved fingers curled into his palm, then uncurled, beckoning unconsciously.

Clive, taking the last step towards Hall, wondered whether love was made up more of desire or of connexion. Both seemed necessary; what was the proper measure? Ought he take Hall's arm and wish he had taken his hand, or ought he take Hall's hand? For it was love, he knew, that he felt for his friend, who grew impatient and dragged him onward. Clive began to doubt that if he had any more of Hall he would want him any less.

Still he made his ascent. When he returned to his rooms, bright from the cold and with snow down his back (Hall had held him down till he was fairly wailing), he put away Risley's novel and took up the _Symposium_.

 

* * *

 

When Hall did come up, he clambered through the window, fumbling with the latches and smearing mud on the sill, all the while unseen by Clive. That night Clive perceived Hall only physically: Hall was flesh, living and mobile, pressing into the feathers of Clive's eiderdown. Hall took Clive's hands in his, crushing Clive's delicate fingers in the damp heat of his palms.

Clive felt his throat working to produce a noise which would draw Hall nearer him. This noise was his name. 'Maurice,' Clive was saying, 'Maurice...' From then on, Clive thought of him as such. Hall was his friend, and Maurice was the man whom he loved. Maurice was the man who took Clive's face in his hands and pulled him up to kiss.

The fact of it was so stunning to Clive that the precise sensation escaped him. He felt, directly afterwards, a certain abused tenderness in his mouth, which hung open. He remembered that their heads had been close together, and that Maurice's breath, still shallow from the effort of climbing through the window, had fallen against his cheek. Because his eyes were closed, it seemed that he and Maurice were in a small room of their own. Clive pressed his face into his pillow in hopes of preserving this feeling; he did not see Maurice depart.

 

* * *

 

They kissed next in early summer. Heat blanketed the full foliage; fitful rains fell; brandy and soda was unseated by gin and tonic. Clive began to be aware that he would not be coming up next term. 'His Cambridge,' which at the start of his first year had seemed his final resting place, was coming to an abrupt close. Soon he would be just like any old man—remembering; wishing to regain, more than the past itself, the possibilities that had once been in view.

Maurice ought to have been his companion from the first, so that their friendship could unfurl over the years. As it was, Clive searched for the fruits of his youth, unaware that they were constituted by the search itself. He skipped lectures to laze in the shade, his head resting in Maurice's lap. He took lunch with Maurice, then tea, then dined with him; then they drank till they were sprawled on the rug, heavy with whisky and the morning light. Often Clive woke aching, yawning, feeling that he had not quite finished with the night before. There was one more rebuttal to be made, one more joke. He had to brush his fingers once more along the back of Maurice's neck.

On one of these nights, Clive and Maurice found themselves sent to Risley's rooms, to replace a framed picture which an acquaintance had liberated the night before. Both of them had had enough to drink—Clive less than Maurice, for Maurice was more vigorous—and were lost in familiar passages. When at last they reached Trinity, they remembered that the corridor was unlighted.

'Give it here,' said Maurice, thudding up the staircase behind Clive, who held the picture. 'I carry; you navigate. Go ahead of me.'

Their clothing rustled as they exchanged positions. Clive felt, without knowing quite what it was, the hard line of Maurice's side beneath his jacket. Maurice's hands fumbled over Clive's as he took hold of the picture.

'Ow,' cried Clive, 'you're pinching.'

'And you're in the—hi, who's pinching now!'

Clive crept along the corridor with his palms pressed to the wallpaper, which no doubt was filthy with the hand-prints of those who had come this way before. How many, he wondered, had made their way thus? He did not know whether it was mad of him to imagine that other lovers had come before them; had smeared their sweat along the wallpaper, had made the floor creak beneath their footfalls. Risley and his set, yes, but none of them were lovers exactly.

The picture clattered to the floor. Clive had gone too slowly, so that Maurice, charging ahead, collided with him; he felt himself yanked back as Maurice gripped his elbow for balance. His cry to be turned loose died in his throat. Maurice was taking him by the shoulders, holding him to the wall. The tenor of their interaction had changed: they had closed themselves up in that small room of their own, where their gin-scented breath warmed the air.

'Careful,' said Clive, 'or you'll put your foot through the picture.'

'I don't know where it's gone,' said Maurice, 'I've lost it.' But he made no move to search; that would require bending down, or getting on hands and knees. He pushed his face into Clive's collar, then smacked his lips on Clive's jaw.

'It may be just here,' said Clive, nudging the edge of the frame with his toe.

A larger clatter sounded as Maurice kicked the picture down the corridor, towards the closed door. Rid of that burden, he leant into Clive and kissed him, stubbornly. When Maurice had come through his window, the kiss had been the high point, the resolution of the movement: here it was an opening chord. Clive could not predict with absolute certainty which notes would follow—or whether they would be notes he had heard before. Touching his lips to the side of Maurice's mouth, releasing his grip on Maurice's arms, he drew away.

'Did that pinch, too?' asked Maurice, wounded. He stepped back, and hit his elbow against the banister. The knock was resounding. 'Oh, damn it to hell!'

'I'll take the picture in,' said Clive. 'I'll meet you at the foot of the stairs.'

In a week they would be riding out to the water, hoping to cool themselves. Clive would sit on the bank, by the pile of Maurice's clothing, attempting to separate the pages of his sodden notebook. In the shallows, Maurice would splash, cupping the rushing water and pouring it over himself, shaking droplets out of his hair. That body, Clive would realise, with its sloped shoulders and its soft stomach, was Maurice's own: it did not belong to Clive, and would not come into his possession.

 

* * *

 

They were men, splendidly, with dark suits and moustaches, before they were so close again. Maurice was at Hill and Hall, and Clive studied for the bar. Their meeting place was now a niche in a much wider world. There were always others in the corridors of the block of flats. Clive took what privacy he was able, and furnished his flat with care: he brought in heavy, sedate tables, and drapes that blocked the light. There, the light came in from the west, whereas his rooms at Trinity had faced east. The pictures and trinkets he had kept in those rooms were languishing in the attics at Penge; Clive made no attempt to fashion an annexe to that period.

He began to take more comfort in Maurice's presence than in the anticipation of it. How or why the change occurred, he did not know. One Sunday morning he found himself breakfasting with Maurice, rubbing his stockinged feet up and down Maurice's calves (Maurice was softening after nearly a year in an office), and realising that he was glad for the clack of Maurice's cutlery, the twitch of Maurice's legs. Though the lower half of Maurice's face was hidden by the morning paper, Clive saw his brow furrow as he squinted at the small type.

'It says here a shop assistant reports a man having come in to sell a “very old picture of a woman”,' said Maurice, who followed with some interest the case of 'La Joconde'. Beneath the table, he nudged his foot against Clive's. 'He had better not ask us to sneak it in again.'

It was at these times, Clive thought, that he most rejoiced in Maurice's insensibility. Though Clive was beset by an astonishing affection, he was protected: Maurice was chewing his toast.

In the evening Maurice was more perceptive. His body uncoiled from the hunch of the office, and he sprawled in his chair by the fire, pipe in hand. He seemed to have been given the room to spread out his thoughts, to venture into farther corners. When Clive came in, Maurice watched him as he unbuttoned his waistcoat and rolled up his sleeves, pausing for a moment to yawn.

'Come,' said Maurice, muffled by his pipe. 'Quickly, or you shall fall asleep midway across.'

'Any news of “La Joconde”?' teased Clive.

'I'll tell you the news.' Maurice took Clive by the waist and looked up at him, smiling vaguely, as if he were not entirely certain that he was allowed to be amused. Clive recognised this as the look of Maurice thinking, and watched his face so carefully that he did not see him reaching out to pull Clive onto his lap. 'How is that?'

Flinging an arm around Maurice's shoulder, Clive said, 'That's no news at all.'

Physically, they were just as they had been at Cambridge, in their rooms, resting for a moment before hall or a lecture. Something in the spirit of the scene, however, rendered it entirely unlike those gentle, private afternoons. There would be no thumping of callers in the corridor outside, breaking them apart before they could press for too long against each other. Maurice was rubbing his nose along Clive's neck; Clive felt acutely the heat of Maurice's body, the quickening of his breath. No doubt Maurice felt everything there was to feel of Clive.

_What more is there than this?_ Clive asked himself, and responded, _There is nothing._ He leant his head against Maurice's shoulder until drowsiness took hold, washing away the pathetic calls of his body. Did it wash away the calls of Maurice's body also? Maurice stroked Clive's hair, but did so absently, as though his hands wished to be elsewhere.

 

* * *

 

Most moments are encountered only once—remembered, perhaps, or reshaped, but not re-experienced. Some are visited upon one again. Clive discovered this when he caught influenza from another subaltern, and was taken from Delville Wood to a base hospital in Abbeville. He lay soaked in sweat, half-submerged in memory. Sometimes he rose up, sputtering, catching sight of a nurse's capelet or a rain-speckled window; more often he fell beneath, and emerged into the body of the boy who kissed his friend in the dark corridor, or sat in his lap as his friend stroked his hair.

When he was beneath, he had only a faint awareness that he had had that tenderness before. Though his body in the dream was as weak as his body in waking life, he felt himself shifting against his friend, grasping him, searching for something inside of him. Then, as he rose towards the surface, he was struck by fear, and cried, 'No, Maurice, no, it won't do, I'm sorry. I wish it were— I wish I could—'

If he was given morphine, the fear subsided, and he fell backwards into the past. He reached, if only in a passing touch, the part of his friend that he sought. He felt he was unforgivable; he felt he was divine. He wept openly, as though in front of a companion with whom everything could be shared. He realised, in time, that these were only the wild meanderings of a sick mind, or more precisely of a sick soul; but he felt nonetheless that the dream had given him some rare satisfaction. He carried a part of the dream-friend within him, as he carried part of every friend for whom he had once cared.

 

* * *

 

Even as the years passed, Clive retained a vision of Maurice at Cambridge that was like a picture-postcard: Maurice in the stream, wading towards the shore, his skin sparkling with the reflection of the water. Clive remembered few others with such clarity. Risley, for instance, he saw only as a blur of a figure passing through the court: they had not bidden each other goodbye.

Because Clive had so little reason to remember what Risley had looked like, he was not shocked, upon happening across him at a party, to see how he had changed. He seemed to have grown taller, but upon further inspection proved only to have grown thinner. The ironical twist of the mouth remained, but was drawn at the corners, giving him a look of barely-restrained bitterness.

'I always thought you were threatening to become a poet,' said Risley. 'Now I see you have done very well at becoming conventional. I like it when someone shows a propensity for something unexpected.' Gesturing to a passing waiter, he added, 'Why haven't you got a drink? Here we are.'

After they had had several glasses of blanc-cassis, Risley divulged that he had not taken his seat in the House of Lords since before the war. 'The first and the last time was in 1912. I might have done it again if there wasn't that slight interruption.' He had the taut, trembling grin of someone who was anxious to make light of his troubles. 'And as soon as I was demobbed I scampered off and took a palazzo in Venice, which proved to be rather a better seat, on the whole...'

'Do you know,' Risley continued, taking several tries to strike a match, 'in Palestine I came across a Private Hall whose Christian name I later discovered was Maurice.'

'You don't mean the Hall we knew?' Now Clive's hands, too, were shaking.

'Possibly, if Hall had lost five inches and grew a ginger moustache. No, our Hall is lost to the ages. As is, indeed, Private Hall, who caught a scrap of Ottoman shrapnel. One hopes ours fared better. But if you haven't any idea where he is, I doubt anyone else does; you were the favourite. _Have_ you any idea?'

Risley would be too pleased to hear what had happened to Maurice. It ought to have happened to Risley, Clive thought, and shook his head. But Risley did not really mind what had happened to that slow, suburban chap who had once hung on the fringes of his set. For that matter, he did not really mind about Clive. When he asked Clive if he wouldn't like to stop by a place he knew, he must have thought he was exhibiting an enormous magnanimity.

The 'place' was prim and decorous—leather armchairs dotted the tiled floor, and a man in tails played softly on a white piano—but something in the arrangement of the men alerted Clive to its nature. It frightened him to realise that after nearly ten years of marriage, he remained attuned to these 'others'. He felt, as he had with Risley and Bigham, the tension of invisible cords drawing individuals nearer together. Not five minutes had passed before Risley was joined by a young man who bore a passing resemblance to Ivor Novello.

It occurred to Clive, as he watched Risley dance his fingertips over the young man's shoulder, that the churning in his stomach was not revulsion but envy. It wasn't the thought of the physical that stirred him; it was simply that these men had a sociability fuller and richer than any dinner party at Penge. He had the sense that every conversation was, in its own way, enthralling; but he could not listen in long enough to understand what they were saying to each other. The noise of the room swirled around him, pushed through the air by the music. The man at the piano was singing…

'You know Lord Risley?' said another young man, this one fairer than the other. He perched on the edge of Clive's armchair. His shirt was cheap, Clive noticed, but he was wearing engraved cufflinks. 'He hasn't brought you round before? You look like someone who might have been here, one time or another.'

If he liked, Clive could take this young man to a hotel in Soho, where he would come to know the freckles on Clive's back, the scar on his thigh, the precise measure and curve of his limbs. These were the things that Anne, in her enviable modesty, did not know: and some marks, having been acquired in the war, were not known even to Maurice. Clive balked at the phrase Maurice had used—'shared'—was it not a giving, without hope that what had been given would be returned? But Clive would keep his freckles, his scar. He would be as full as he had been before, or fuller.

Clive made his goodbyes to Risley, retrieved his coat and hat, and went alone into the night. The streets were wide and windswept; its only occupants were the motor-cars, with their exhaust and their trailing lights. That part of London was unfamiliar to Clive, and he found himself walking in circles, passing by the same chapels and corner cafes. He took solace in the lines of street-lamps. No sooner did one lamp pass than he was lighted by another.

 

* * *

 

_iii. Now_

Maurice's woods were northern, and felt winter earlier than the south. The leaves of the seasonal trees had fallen, revealing the proud, dark turrets of the evergreens. A slight rain had crusted into frost, putting a sheen over the bark and the the dense, musty undergrowth. But life had not yet left: yellow blooms of witch hazel sparkled in the distance, and warblers called from their perches. As he made his way down the overgrown path, Clive was suffused with a boyish sense of certainty, invulnerability. He felt that whichever way he walked, there would be water; and here the rivers led out to the sea.

At the village inn, where he had stopped for a cup of tea, he had been joined by a villager who seemed invigorated by the appearance of a stranger. The man told him that there was a Benedictine abbey not five miles out, and that the birds from the north, from across the sea, were just coming in for the winter.

Clive asked the villager whether he had not heard of two men living somewhere nearby. At that, the villager sat back in his chair, folding his hands over his stomach, frowning as though he were trying to glimpse something distant.

'The woodsmen,' said the villager. 'Oh, they're not so hidden as all that. Mind, I've never known them to have visitors before, not ones like yourself. Some time ago there was a lady….'

'I thought they might have gone to the war,' said Clive.

'They did—and came back, too. The younger one earlier, on account of his leg, and the other after the armistice. I suspect they were keen to be home again.'

'Yes, I imagine so.' Clive peered into his cup, where the reflection of the dingy lamps wavered in the tea. 'Most of us were.'

'Those two must have felt it specially. There aren't so many men left in the woods,' said the villager, 'or so many woods left for the men. They might not have known there was any home left.'

There was a home left, Clive discovered: a cottage in a copse, with neat rows of firewood and a healthy bloom of smoke from the leaning chimney. An ax was buried in a block. The paths on the grounds had not been cleared, but worn into the grass by years of walking. There was a sense that the scene was the product of two lives, at once independent and intertwined; this was a place which had seen rows, reunions, chases through the trees, dozes under shade in summer. Inside was a fire at which two men warmed their hands; a bed in which two men slept, warm under faded linen and knitted blankets. Inside was a lamp: the yellow light shone through the window, flickering as a figure passed towards the door.

After Clive returned to Penge, the vision of Maurice at Cambridge would be supplanted by a vision of Maurice in the cottage. He stood before the fire, quiet and intent, his shirt stained by sweat and his hands worn with work, looking across the room with what Clive recognised as an effort at retrieving an old love; a gentle, expressive equality.

'Do you remember the Symphony “Pathétique”?' asked Clive. 'The second movement, the one we played—'

With a smile threatening at the corner of his mouth, Maurice sang, 'La-la da-da-da la-la la la...' He lifted his finger in imitation of a conductor, and Clive saw him with his hands pressed to the bench of Fetherstonhaugh's pianola, his head bobbing as he followed the melody. Clive had seen in Maurice, then, the look of a child who for the first time comes upon someone who is alike.

'They've put it on a gramophone record, now; I only just found it out. For a moment I didn't know what I was listening to. Of course when I placed it...' 

'A voice does sometimes come,' said Maurice. 'It is pretty good luck to follow it.'

Maurice placed his hand at the small of Clive's back, as if that were the place of the heart. He went, then, to stoke the fire, and to tell Scudder to draw water from the well.


End file.
